Broward may line beaches with recycled glass

Pulverized glass may be coming to a beach near you, but you won't be able to tell the difference because it will look and feel like sand beneath your feet.

Broward County commissioners will decide Tuesday whether to support a program that could mean spending $1.5 million on an experiment to see if glass can be an alternative to sand on South Florida's eroding beaches.

"I see no reason why it won't work from an environmental standpoint," said Eric Myers, the county's Natural Resources Administrator. "It walks and talks and looks like sand, so no reason for it not to behave in the water like sand."

Previous plans were scrapped because of the costs. But now the time might be right to try again, he said. The permits have long expired, so if the commissioners approve, staff would need to re-apply for federal permits — and figure out how to pay for it all.

"It's environmentally feasible, you have to make it economically feasible," he said.

That's not the take in Palm Beach County, where officials decided "it's not really cost effective," said Leanne Welch, the Palm Beach County Environmental Program supervisor in the Shoreline Enhancement & Restoration division. "The cost of the glass is too much versus what we would pay for [sand] traditionally — from a mine or dredged from the bottom of the ocean."

Still, she said governments need to come up with Plan B's when it comes to sand. "We are running out of sand statewide, we're all going to have to put our heads together and come up with solutions, whether it's purchasing sand from the Bahamas or Turks and Caicos or another island. Statewide, we're dealing with shrinking sand coupled with shrinking budgets," Welch said.

In Broward, Myers has studied samples: "If I hold it in my hand it reminds me of the sand you see in the Gulf Coast — that's very fine ... without the shell fragments we have in our beaches here."

Engineers could create the size of the sand to replicate what's on the beaches now. They could also replicate color, since glass could be greens or whites.

It's really not a far-fetched idea, Myers said. "The raw materials for glass are basically sand," he said.

Using pulverized glass to look and feel like sand grains was first discussed in 2003, Myers said. In 2004, the county and state decided to fund a project that resulted in a series of tests: The ground-up glass was placed in aquariums to make sure the water wouldn't become too cloudy; the bacteria levels were tested; and temperatures were checked to make sure sea turtle nests wouldn't be hurt by the change.

"That seemed to work well," Myers said of the tests.

But a plan in 2008 to spend $1,447,000 on an experiment — 3,000 tons of recycled glass at the waterline in Hollywood — was derailed by the recession, although there had been some opposition in random opinion polls. Some were worried about quality control, concerned if tourists would stay away from the beach if they worried about one shard getting accidentally though the production line.

Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, isn't worried. She said she grew up in Miami Beach "with real sand, and I got cut with glass lots of times I can't even tell you [from] glass washed up or had been left behind from some very unthoughtful beer drinker," she said.

Grossman keeps a jar of the sand from recycled glass in a jar on her desk. She thinks maybe the idea was too far ahead of its time a decade ago.

"Our visitors are much more concerned there's a beach. And if the best way to renourish our beaches ... and the most environmentally friendly way is with recycled sand, then bring it on," she said.

But it was because of financial reasons, in 2010, that the state withdrew its portion — $180,000 — saying it could no longer afford it, Myers said.

Among lingering questions is just which manufacturing company has the ability to even turn large amounts of glass into sand, Myers said. There is just one major company in Florida — Strategic Materials, of Houston — with the resources to pull it off, said Ron Henricks, spokesman for the state's Department of Environmental Protection. The company has locations in Jacksonville and Sarasota.

"Anything that helps recycle glass we like," Henricks said. "Glass is hard to recycle — physically it's not hard but the logistics make it difficult because it weighs a lot and the more distance you have to transport it, the more it costs you because the transportation costs are what end up killing you."

Still, the concept has caught on in other parts of the country, if even to a smaller degree. Abilene, Texas, uses glass — mostly empty beer and wine glass — and pulverizes it into sand that's available for people to pick up.